Okay, Library Thing… As a coworker of mine pointed out it is kind of like Myspace or Myspace for those who have books. I get that in how it is designed with the ability to function as a social networking site. You can use it to locate individuals who share similar reading interests or just happen to have the same book as you. Like any social networking site you are making connections based on some kind of similarity or interest shared with another individual.
There are a lot of other interesting features built in, such as the ability to look at reviews of books, or how other users rate various books. I like how you can place a search of your own personal catalog or a randomly generated set of titles from your personal library on your own blog or website. If you use the option to show covers it creates a pretty cool visual effect.
What I was most impressed by was how easy it was to add an item from your own collection of books to create an online catalog for yourself. Just entering the title or ISBN created either the item you have or a list of items that have that title, then all you have to do is click on that item and, bingo!, it is now in your personal Librarything catalog. It is just as easy to create keywords or ratings for your library. I found this a fascinating way of easily seeing what books you have and how you associate and create meaning for the items in your library.
My biggest quandary was what to put in my library. I mean just adding the books I own is one thing, but what about the books my wife owns that I often read as well? Or what about books that I am temporarily borrowing from friends or the library? These aren’t items I own, but they are temporarily in my possession. They are borrowed items and will revert back to their rightful items in time, but do I consider them as part of my library? I finally decided that these items would be a part of my library, but “temporarily”. In fact I could even tag them as temporary or being borrowed. As for items in my house, but being shared I decided the easiest thing would be to make my library broad to include all items in my house whehter I would necessarily read them or not. After some thougt I set out to add some items. So far I have uploaded one shelf from my “library”. It was done pretty quickly, but one shelf means I have a ways to go…
All right I have online library, now what?
My next quandary is can I add my movies and CDs and if not, why not? Hmm, I need to go look into this. I’ll continue this thought later when I find out the answer…
Ta ta for now!